Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma's Invisible Hands - Softcover

Sismondo, Sergio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0995527776 ISBN 13: 9780995527775

Publisher: Mattering Press, 2018

Synopsis

Ghost-Managed Medicine by Sergio Sismondo explores a spectral side of medical knowledge, based in pharmaceutical industry tactics and practices.

Hidden from the public view, the many invisible hands of the pharmaceutical industry and its agents channel streams of drug information and knowledge from contract research organizations (that extract data from experimental bodies) to publication planners (who produce ghostwritten medical journal articles) to key opinion leaders (who are sent out to educate physicians about drugs) to patient advocacy organizations (who ventriloquize views on diseases, treatments and regulations), and onward. The goal of this 'assemblage marketing' is to establish conditions that make specific diagnoses, prescriptions and purchases as obvious and frequent as possible. While staying in the shadows, companies create powerful markets in which increasing numbers of people become sick and the drugs largely sell themselves.

Most agents for drug companies aim to tell the truth, but the truths they tell are drawn from streams of knowledge that have been fed, channeled and maintained by the companies at every possible opportunity. Especially because those companies have concentrated influence and narrow interests, consumers and others should be concerned about how epistemic power is distributed - or 'political economies of knowledge' - and not just about truth and falsity of medical knowledge.

In pharmaceutical companies' ideal worlds, medical research, education and marketing would be tightly fused. Doctors trying to educate themselves would turn to companies' agents, such as researchers and educators sponsored to spread particular messages, local sales reps hired to change doctors' behaviour, or journalists supplied with news stories. Ghost-Managed Medicine shows that the real world of medicine is not very far from the worlds that the companies want to create. Big Pharma's many invisible hands are busy throughout medicine, and medicine changes as a result.

Ghost-Managed Medicine draws on presentations at industry conferences, especially ones where pharmaceutical companies interact with communication, marketing and other agencies. Participants at these interface conferences describe goals, practices and concerns; in the process, they reveal a lot about how the industry works. Some of the book's other data is taken from publications that also serve as interfaces between the industry and adjacent actors, and from interviews with people engaged in pharmaceutical marketing.

About this title

About the Author

Sergio Sismondo is a Professor at Queen's University in Ontario. He does research in Science & Technology Studies at intersections of philosophy and sociology of science. Recently he has been studying the nature and distribution of pharmaceutical research, seeing this as a project in the political economy of knowledge. Earlier and continuing work has been connected to questions about realism, constructivism, and deflationism. Sismondo is currently editor of the journal Social Studies of Science, one of the flagship journals in Science and Technology Studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mattering Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0995527776
• ISBN 13: 9780995527775
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 234